Story by Josh Hayter
Capt. Jimmy Albrecht of the New York Police Department remembers growing up in Queens and taking trips to Manhattan with his father, where they watched as the World Trade Center was being built.
He never dreamed he would watch it fall.
On that day ten years ago, Albrecht was a New York City Police officer in command of 300 policemen. On Monday, in the Dillard College of Business, he shared his eyewitness account with students, staff and faculty.
Albrecht, now 50 years old, said he was sitting in his office reading crime reports when an officer knocked on his door.
“Cap’, a plane just flew into the World Trade Center,” she said.
Albrecht flipped on the TV. When he saw the second explosion, he thought it was caused by debris from the first building striking the second tower. Then he heard a reporter say that a second plane had hit.
“Look at the sky – it’s blue,” he said. “There’s no way a second plane hit the tower.”
But he was wrong.
Then the police radio barked, “Mobilization level four!” It was the code for a city wide emergency deployment.
He grabbed his helmet and fired up the police bus. With ambulances in front of him and fire trucks behind him, he sped toward the World Trade Center.
“You get to the top of the hill and you see the full Manhattan sky,” Albrecht said. “I got to that point and I saw the two towers burning. It was pretty distressful, amazing and surreal.”
Then he heard something he would never forget – a police officer yelling out on the radio, “Watch out! The building’s coming down! Watch out! The building’s coming down!”
What building is he talking about? Albrecht wondered.
He jerked his head to the left and watched as the first tower crumbled to the ground.
Albrecht was standing next to Building Number Seven when the second tower fell. He and other rescuers ran for cover as debris from the tower swept over the streets, swallowing everything in its path.
“We ran into the subway. There was no visibility whatsoever,” he recalled. “It looked like a snowstorm.”
Albrecht said that until that day there was nothing New York City First Responders couldn’t handle.
On that day, 3,000 civilians were killed along with 343 firefighters and 66 police officers.
For 40 percent of the victims, no remnants were ever found.
“Even though it was a very tragic day, it was a very successful day in terms of rescue workers,” Albrecht said. “We were able to accomplish a lot (and) rescue literally thousands of people.”
He said 60,000 people worked in the two towers. But on 9/11, at 8:46 a.m., when the first plane hit, many hadn’t arrived to their jobs. Only 34,000 people were in the towers at that point. And despite communication complications, rescue workers were able to rescue 99 percent of the people below the points of impact. Within three hours, more than three million people were evacuated from Lower Manhattan, he said.
But 10 years later, the future would be grim for more than 1,000 First Responders, Albrecht included. They have been diagnosed with cancer or a life-threatening disease due to the toxins they breathed in during the days of rescue. Since 9/11, 400 New York police officers, firefighters and rescuers have died from complications related to their exposure to carcinogens at Ground Zero, he said.
“Last week, two firefighters and a cop died,” he said. “On average, three people who worked at the World Trade Center site, either on Sept. 11 or after, die every week. And the number keeps increasing.”
Both New York City and the Federal Government refuse to acknowledge that the cancer that rescue workers contracted is related to the events of Sept. 11, he said.
“I’m a cancer survivor. I can tell you that my cancer is attributed to 9/11. I had skin cancer on everywhere that was exposed that day,” he said. “It ain’t from goin’ to the beach, I can tell you that.”
“Since then, we’ve already lost more rescue workers through cancer and lung disease, due to the carcinogens, cement and dust that went into their lungs, than we lost on that day,” Albrecht continued.
Albrecht retired in 2003 but said he suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder due to the traumatic events on 9/11.
“I started watching some of the memorials yesterday and turned them off after five minutes,” he said. “It’s a little too overwhelming.”
Asked by an audience member about how he deals with what he experienced that day, Albrecht said that he prays and has become more of a family man.
“I pray a lot,” he said. “I make time for myself and my family now. You have to make time to unwind.”